ON a feverishly hot night in the village of Saukila in southern Malawi Enelesi Makwinja was startled to see several tall dark figures looming over her bed. She was in no doubt as to their identity — they were vampires who had come to suck her blood.

Makwinja screamed but before she could run from her mud hut the creatures had vanished.

Described by the tourist guides as the warm heart of Africa, Malawi is a beautiful country whose collapsing economy has fed a rumour-mill of superstitions. Most bizarre among them is an increasingly widespread fear that vampires are stalking remote villages in the south.

The unpopular government of President Bakili Muluzi, so the rumour goes, is in league with these creatures to collect human blood so that it can be sold to international aid agencies in exchange for food.

Makwinja’s home lies about 30 miles from the city of Blantyre at the end of winding, potholed lanes, and over makeshift bridges precariously poised over swollen rivers.

In her fifties and long since abandoned by her husband, she scrapes a living from a plot of land. Makwinja had not eaten when we met at 3pm. Her family’s last meal had been a bowl of pumpkin leaves the previous day.

Makwinja’s main preoccupation at present, however, is not poverty but vampires. She has heard how in neighbouring villages vampires have torn roofs off houses to insert pipes through which they are said to infuse a noxious gas that overwhelms their victims. The vampires then use syringes to steal blood, which they carry away in black sacks.

“Proof” has been found in the form of syringes of blood, she said. She also claims to know at least one woman asphyxiated by vampires.

Makwinja’s nephew, Gerson Kuselima, 18, formed a vigilante force of l4 other men from her village. Armed with pickaxes, machetes and pangas, they patrolled the thickly wooded hills for l2 nights until, they claim, they encountered several tall dark creatures in long black coats. They gave chase but the vampires fled into a graveyard and vanished.

Vampire hysteria has gripped Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, at a time when it is afflicted by what people in southern Africa call the ugly sisters: famine and Aids. More than 1m of Malawi’s llm people have died from Aids, although such deaths are rarely reported in rural areas — home to 80% of the population — where the disease bears a terrible stigma.

Last weekend, after touring Malawi, James Morris, head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), said more than 3m suffered from hunger. “Make no mistake: food is the most important drug in the fight against Aids,” he said.

Neither Makwinja nor her large extended family has seen any of the WFP lorries loaded with sacks of maize in southern Malawi. Locals claim Muluzi has told the agency the people there do not need help.

Last week a demonstration took place in Blantyre against Muluzi’s attempts to push a bill through parliament that would alter the constitution, allowing him to stand for a third term after his second finishes next year. Two people were hurt by rubber bullets and tear gas.

A few nights after Makwinja suffered her ordeal the vampires reportedly struck again and sucked the blood of Anne James, 40, just 10 miles away. Her family took her to hospital and she was put on a drip after she was found to be anaemic, but died soon afterwards. Her father, Roger James, said: “We know it was the blood-suckers who killed her.”

She is not the only one to have died during the scare: two men seen acting suspiciously at night were stoned to death. Three Catholic priests were also attacked. Eric Chiwaya, the governor of Blantyre, was beaten up after he was accused by a neighbouring village chief of conspiring to let vampires suck the villagers’ blood.

The government has tried in vain to calm the situation and accused the opposition of trying to create a state of national insecurity. Yet Muluzi only fuelled fears when he declared recently: “No government can suck the blood of its people.”

In much of Malawi drought and flood have devastated the maize crop; men and women become emaciated and die mysteriously; babies contract strange illnesses that send them crazy. Is it any wonder that these villagers who lack adequate food, education and healthcare choose to blame spells and malevolent forces?

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